Green tea fresh harvests

The status of green teas, as of May 1, 2026

Working directly with producers scattered across a broad geographic locations has not been an easy task even in the free port of Hong Kong. It is a lot more difficult in the more restrictive border of Japan. And costly. That is why we devise ways to minimise expenses to lessen the dramatic lowering of operational margin here in order to continue our tradition of top quality at best value prices.

One way is the gang up harvests from different regions to ship together. Not all varieties are harvested in the same time though, even for the first flush of tea of the same name. I talked about that for a few times.

For example, Longjing. Late in March, a farmer we have been buying from sent me a message saying that her Longjing was almost ready to send and asked me how much I needed. People had been saying that the harvest was happening much earlier this year, and I have been buying from her for over 15 years so even before tasting I retained the volume that I predicted we would sell for the year, but asked her to send the sample for tasting anyway.

Luckily we waited out for the logistics with some other harvests. The sample came and it was not the Longjing from the old traditional cultivar we have been offering. She has opted to follow the trend to change to the new cultivar for earlier harvest for better money rather than retaining the richer original taste of true Longjing.

So we waited again. I am lucky to have more than one farmer for this tea. And decided that we should wait out for the much later harvest green tea variety of Taiping Houkui as well.

Now all spring harvests of our green tea offerings from China are on offer, except for the yellow teas that we have decided to discontinue, and the Bamboo Leaf that we have decided to rest a bit more before releasing.

A wonderful Taiwan green tea, lost

Besides green teas from China, we originally had anchored a rare batch of a high altitude green tea from Sanxia in Taiwan. It is the best green tea I have personally tasted ever. Competition to get such rare quality has always been keen. 35kg of it had already been sent to a client in Switzerland. The producer then packed the remaining portion in one carton to send to us. DHL came and picked it up as another shipment to her other client when she was busy in the field. Someone else was happy and I wasted all the efforts in the writing and photo for launching this wonderful tea. Hopefully the harvest will be as good next year.

Japanese green teas

As for the green tea line from Japan, farmers are still busy with harvesting at the time I am writing this*. Please be alerted of those products that have long already infested the market with false claims that flood the social media. You know how unscrupulous some merchants are, and how under-informed some teashop operators can be. I shall write about this infestation in another post.

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• Note:
  A few early harvests are indeed out already, in southerly and hot regions like Kagoshima, but they are either tencha for blending or other items not in our quality range. Higher quality Japanese products are not ready yet. We have placed an early order in some key quality producers and they all predict the earliest delivery time to be late May ~ June.